I'm a fan of TDKR but the biggest gripe I have is a serious issue with the film. In Batman Begins, it is clear that Gotham is corrupt and both Batman and Raas take different ideological approaches to the corruption. Batman thinks it can be saved. Raas believes it is for the good of the world to allow Gotham to perish as it is beyond saving.

Fast forward 8 years or so later. Batman was right. He managed to manipulate the system and work with Gordon and Dent to make a peaceful Gotham. It required Batmans sacrifice but it demonstrated Gotham was not beyond saving.

So, why is it the reformed League of Shadows cares to destroy Gotham? The film toys with the idea that there is still evil below the surface. But this evil is the League itself. The film also toys with the idea that Talia and Bane want vengeance for Raas death. But vengeance means destroying an entire city of people who didn't have anything to do with his death?

My biggest gripe with the film. Would welcome a rational explanation for what motivates the primary villains to want to kill millions of people.

There is mass social and political corruption. Street criminals are behind bars but men like Daggett are still manipulating those under them and aren't opposed to dealing with shady characters like Bane to get what they want.

Also, the League of Shadows is an extreme fundamentalist group. Since when do fundamentalists ever make sense? Their doctrines are always extreme and questionable. Bottomline: They still see Gotham as rotten to the core and it needs to be cleansed. Bane probably felt especially vindicated when he discovered Commissioner Gordon's speech about Dent.

The only thing that Gotham did was lock up all those involved in the mofia world. They still have a corrupt society, just that it deals in the field of white collar crime, which an be harder to prosecute. In BB, Ra's tells Bruce that they tried a different approach to destroy Gotham, economics. In the movie, Dagget's motive is about money and he uses that to obtain power. The scene where bane kills him demonstrates this when he thinks that giving bane money should give him leverage over bane. Also, his attempt to takeover Wayne enterprise with the help of bane.
Bane wanted to prove he was better than Bruce and that that Ra's was wrong by excommunicating him by destroying Gotham. Talia had the same conviction as her father and would gladly die to see come through. She and her father believed Gotham was beyond saving and no matter what Bruce or Gotham did would matter. Bane did not feel the need to sacrifice himself. I.E., when bane tells Bruce that he has too kill him and that he would just have imagine that the bomb exploded and everything; this was meant for bane to leave or find a safe place from the blast.
Lastly, the dent act was corrupt from the beginning since it based on a lie and the people would not have supported it if they knew the truth about Harvey dent.

I know that Gotham wasn't perfect and that the way they abolished crime was imperfect but to decide to destroy and entire city that is now peaceful seems too much. Unlike other fundamentalist groups of today, I always saw the League of Shadows as having more honour in a strange way. Batman and Raas didn't like each other but there was mutual respect.

Another part of the problem too, from TLOS' perspective, was that Gotham was only able to get rid of criminals en masse on the basis of a lie, which defended a man that was really a murderer.

They didn't know that when they came back to Gotham. Bane only discovered the Dent cover up by accident when Gordon was brought to his lair and they found his confessional letter on him. If they knew that BEFORE they came to Gotham, then it would have made a lot more sense. There was no reason for the LOS to destroy Gotham. The city was prospering in a peace time where crime rates were so low that the Mayor was going to retire Gordon.

Greedy businessman like Daggett are everywhere all over the world. Much like how every city has some degree of crime in it like the Mayor said. I don't see the LOS targeting every city in the world. It's a pathetic reason to destroy a whole city because of that. At least Ra's in Begins was all about destroying Gotham when it was overrun with crime and corruption. I could buy into his philosophy. I couldn't take Bane's plan seriously at all. Especially after Ra's and Joker's schemes had some logic to them.

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"Sometimes I remember it one way. Sometimes another. If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"

Honestly, I don't think there was a deep ideal to this plot like their was with Ras' plan.

Ras wanted to destroy the city because he felt the corruption was beyond saving. He failed.

IMO, in Talia's mind, she just wanted to finish what he father couldn't. She didn't see the same ideals that Ras had. She just saw him fail for the first time, blamed Batman for his death and simply wanted to kill Bruce Wayne, physically and emotionally, and destroy Gotham to, in HER eyes, finish her father's work. While that would finish her father's failed mission, I don't think she saw his ideals. She was doing it for the wrong reasons.

Bane was just a pawn in the end. His only motivation was a personal feeling that Bruce betrayed the LOS. And when you consider Bane was exiled, while Bruce was seen as the perfect successor to lead the LOS, Bane was simply jealous. He worked with Talia on her plan, while trying to seek revenge based on his personal jealousy of Bruce and his Ras' view of him. Ras saw Bruce as having the tools to lead the LOS, which he never saw in Bane. I think it's quite simple.

Also remember that, because of the changes in those ideals, this wasn't the same LOS. Sure it kept the name, but without Ras leading it, the philosophies and operations have changed. Compare it to Wayne Enterprises. When Tom and Martha were killed and WE was run by the board, their operations were very very different. They basically set aside everything the Wayne's stood for, and openly said it. Remember the company deciding to go public? It wasn't until Bruce bought the majority share and essentially controlled the company again that he could get his family's name back to what it was.

Change in leadership changes the entire company. The company I work for is going through that, Apple has gone through that, Disney went through it.... it happens everywhere. If you ask me, the LOS' mentality got very clouded after Ras' death and became driven by revenge and personal gain rather than ideology, even if the ideology involved mass murder.

In my opinion, they missed a real chance in using something like the "Dent Act" to really milk out on what could really have been wrong with Gotham during those 8 years.

If BB showed a Gotham that was controlled by the mafia/criminals, then imagine on what they could have done with TDKR if they showed Gotham being ruled with a iron fist by the government; where due to the intense violence in the past, the system went extreme due to how they felt was the best way to prevent from crime going up like it once did, thus losing sight of what it stood for in the past, just like Bruce did with his crusade. It would have been a good parallel.

Honestly, I don't think there was a deep ideal to this plot like their was with Ras' plan.

Ras wanted to destroy the city because he felt the corruption was beyond saving. He failed.

IMO, in Talia's mind, she just wanted to finish what he father couldn't. She didn't see the same ideals that Ras had. She just saw him fail for the first time, blamed Batman for his death and simply wanted to kill Bruce Wayne, physically and emotionally, and destroy Gotham to, in HER eyes, finish her father's work. While that would finish her father's failed mission, I don't think she saw his ideals. She was doing it for the wrong reasons.

My thoughts as well.

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" The Red Capes are coming, the red capes are coming..."

This was the third attack by the LoS against Gotham City. Keep in mind that the first attack created the Depression, and Ra's credited the Wayne's for saving the city. But he didn't care. Because at the top of their list is saving the world from Gotham and setting an example, not saving Gotham.

There is mass social and political corruption. Street criminals are behind bars but men like Daggett are still manipulating those under them and aren't opposed to dealing with shady characters like Bane to get what they want.

Also, the League of Shadows is an extreme fundamentalist group. Since when do fundamentalists ever make sense? Their doctrines are always extreme and questionable. Bottomline: They still see Gotham as rotten to the core and it needs to be cleansed. Bane probably felt especially vindicated when he discovered Commissioner Gordon's speech about Dent.

The League of Shadows are dogmatists. Ra's had set his sights on destroying Gotham for many years, and had tried twice in two different decades under very different circumstances. I don't think they saw Gotham's attempt to fix itself in the wake of Harvey Dent's death as any different from when it tried to fix itself in the wake of Thomas Wayne's death. In fact, Gotham becoming a police state with an ever-widening gap between the haves and have nots was probably just seen as further insult to injury. They don't think too highly of politicians on principal, hence their existence as a global organization working from the shadows.

Bruce- "This man should be tried"
Ra's- By who? Corrupt bureaucrats?"

So yeah, Bane finding that letter only vindicated the fervent beliefs that were already driving the mission, as Agent Orange pointed out.

In TDKR, Gotham is a city well past its expiration date in the eyes of the LOS. But with Bane and Talia at the head, there's a deadly combination of hatred, vengeance and brutality mixed in with fulfilling an old mission.

Honestly, I don't think there was a deep ideal to this plot like their was with Ras' plan.

Ras wanted to destroy the city because he felt the corruption was beyond saving. He failed.

IMO, in Talia's mind, she just wanted to finish what he father couldn't. She didn't see the same ideals that Ras had. She just saw him fail for the first time, blamed Batman for his death and simply wanted to kill Bruce Wayne, physically and emotionally, and destroy Gotham to, in HER eyes, finish her father's work. While that would finish her father's failed mission, I don't think she saw his ideals. She was doing it for the wrong reasons.

Exactly. Which makes the whole thing even more shallow.

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Bane was just a pawn in the end. His only motivation was a personal feeling that Bruce betrayed the LOS. And when you consider Bane was exiled, while Bruce was seen as the perfect successor to lead the LOS, Bane was simply jealous. He worked with Talia on her plan, while trying to seek revenge based on his personal jealousy of Bruce and his Ras' view of him.

Owtch!

That makes Bane sound really pathetic!

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"Sometimes I remember it one way. Sometimes another. If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"

This was the third attack by the LoS against Gotham City. Keep in mind that the first attack created the Depression, and Ra's credited the Wayne's for saving the city. But he didn't care. Because at the top of their list is saving the world from Gotham and setting an example, not saving Gotham.

Missed this great post. This concisely sums up what I've been trying to argue for months regarding this whole scenario.

Ra's was not rational. He only seemed rational, but all of that unravels pretty quickly once you realize he is the reason Gotham is "limping along" in Begins. He never wanted Gotham to fix itself because that spits in the face of everything he believes in. He felt for the good of the world, it needed to be razed to the ground. Everything else he says is just an attempt to justify that base belief.

It's not good for the LOS's reputation to have failed several times to destroy a city. Naturally they were going to keep trying until they were successful and wreak revenge on the one man who had thwarted them before.

Wow, it's like you jumped into my head and saw what I was thinking while I was writing that. It was really shallow and Bane, while a dominant physical threat and diabolical speaker, was a HIGHLY overrated villain. People comparing him to Darth Vader and even putting him the same sentence with Heath Ledger's Joker is, well... a joke.

Both of those aspects just add to why I think TDKR was "good" but easily the weakest of the three films. And while I didn't agree with bringing back the LOS, they could have made it great, but they left a lot on the table and made some terrible decisions.

Wow, it's like you jumped into my head and saw what I was thinking while I was writing that. It was really shallow and Bane, while a dominant physical threat and diabolical speaker, was a HIGHLY overrated villain. People comparing him to Darth Vader and even putting him the same sentence with Heath Ledger's Joker is, well... a joke.

Agreed. Shackling him to Talia and the LOS, especially after Ra's kicked him out of the LOS, and here he was trying to fulfill the work of man who couldn't stand the sight of him, really weakened the character, IMO. It seemed obvious to me he was doing it purely out of devotion to Talia. Just like how he put his life on the line to protect her in the pit when she was a child. Here he was again willing to die just so she can honor her father's work. It's easy to see why he's so often accused of being a sub servant to Talia.

Quote:

Both of those aspects just add to why I think TDKR was "good" but easily the weakest of the three films. And while I didn't agree with bringing back the LOS, they could have made it great, but they left a lot on the table and made some terrible decisions.

Now you're in my head peeking at my thoughts

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"Sometimes I remember it one way. Sometimes another. If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"

Both of those aspects just add to why I think TDKR was "good" but easily the weakest of the three films. And while I didn't agree with bringing back the LOS, they could have made it great, but they left a lot on the table and made some terrible decisions.

Quoted for truth. I was really against them bringing back the LOS, but I think it might have been cool if the League had become a "New" League. One that now served Bane's desires rathen then Ras' philosophy.

I think it's pretty interesting that apparently the one thing Nolan knew about how he wanted to finish the story was bringing back the LOS, before they had even had decided on a villain.

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“Moving on to Dark Knight Rises, I knew that the League of Shadows had to come back,” he says of the secret society of assassins led by Liam Neeson’s Ra’s Al Ghul, the violent Darwinist who recruited Bruce Wayne and taught him the tricks of the stealth-warrior trade in the first film. “I knew that we had to return to Batman Begins and those philosophical ideas of Ra’s Al Ghul, those challenges -- that all had to come back.

This seems to lend more credibility to the rumors that Nolan took a hard stance against Justice League: Mortal partially because it featured Talia coming back to avenge her father, and he wanted to be able to revisit that storyline if he made a third film. Pure speculation, but it's interesting. If there's anything out there that could prove TDKR wasn't some alternative movie that they had to think up because they couldn't use The Joker, confirmation that Nolan had the idea of bringing back the LOS all along could be it.

“After The Dark Knight, it was a much quicker phone call from the studio asking, ‘What about the third?’ ” jokes Thomas. “Chris really had to think about whether or not he wanted to do that; we were very happy with the way we had tied up The Dark Knight.”

Before launching into another Bat-installment, though, Nolan first tackled 2010’s Inception. Then he also took the time to look back to characters and plot threads he’d established with Batman Begins.

The decision was obviously made two years after TDK was done since he didn't come up with that decision until after he'd made Inception, and they well knew by then that using the Joker again was not an option.

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"Sometimes I remember it one way. Sometimes another. If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"

The decision was obviously made two years after TDK was done since he didn't come up with that decision until after he'd made Inception, and they well knew by then that using the Joker again was not an option.

That doesn't line up with other information we have though. We know that Goyer presented him with Bane shortly after TDK premiered, and we know that they had already decided on Bane when Inception was filming and that he was considering Tom Hardy for the part privately with Emma.

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On Inception, where he played part of Leonardo DiCaprio’s dream team, Hardy had joined the ever-expanding Nolan Repertory Company -- which includes Bale, Murphy, Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard -- and Nolan used the opportunity of working with Hardy during the production of that mind-heist thriller as a sort of secret audition to see if the promising young British actor was up for playing the villain.

When Nolan was doing press rounds for Inception, he said his brother had been working on the Batman script "for a long time", so these major story decisions had to have been made well before cameras ever rolled on Inception. The way Nolan phrased it in that article, it sounded like the decision to bring the LOS back came first, and the selection of Bane as a villain came second. Based on reports from earlier this year that give us a timeline of when Bane was chosen, I can only assume the LOS thing was worked out sometime prior to that.

That doesn't line up with other information we have though. We know that Goyer presented him with Bane shortly after TDK premiered, and we know that they had already decided on Bane when Inception was filming and that he was considering Tom Hardy for the part privately with Emma.

When Nolan was doing press rounds for Inception, he said his brother had been working on the Batman script "for a long time", so these major story decisions had to have been made well before cameras ever rolled on Inception.

That doesn't prove a thing. Deciding on what villain they wanted doesn't mean they'd decided what exactly they were going to do with him in the story. Or indeed what the story was going to be. Your own article you posted there proves that when it says Nolan didn't even start looking at Batman Begins plot threads til after Inception. What more proof do you need?

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The way Nolan phrased it in that article, it sounded like the decision to bring the LOS back came first, and the selection of Bane as a villain came second. Based on reports from earlier this year that give us a timeline of when Bane was chosen, I can only assume the LOS thing was worked out sometime prior to that.

You just acknowledged that they were thinking about Bane just after TDK premiered. How does working with Hardy for the first time on Inception and thinking he'd be perfect for Bane give you the impression they had already decided on the LOS before? Again your own article says Nolan did Inception first, THEN he looked at the plots he'd established in Batman Begins.

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"Sometimes I remember it one way. Sometimes another. If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"

That doesn't prove a thing. Deciding on what villain they wanted doesn't mean they'd decided what exactly they were going to do with him in the story. Or indeed what the story was going to be. Your own article you posted there proves that when it says Nolan didn't even start looking at Batman Begins plot threads til after Inception. What more proof do you need?

You just acknowledged that they were thinking about Bane just after TDK premiered. How does working with Hardy for the first time on Inception and thinking he'd be perfect for Bane give you the impression they had already decided on the LOS before? Again your own article says Nolan did Inception first, THEN he looked at the plots he'd established in Batman Begins.

Okay, but the problem here is that one line in the article (which is not a direct quote from Nolan) contradicts everything we know about the timeline for the development of this movie. I also disagree that deciding on a villain means they didn't have an idea of the story. Nolan has said numerous times that they knew "the shape" of the story and then sought to find an appropriate villain. That's how they tend to work.

The script was in development before Inception began shooting, that's pretty much a fact. I would honestly be shocked if there were drafts of the script written by Jonah that included Bane, but NOT the LOS, and Nolan only decided to add them after he finished Inception and reflected on things. That seems highly unlikely to me. That would mean they basically started from scratch and then started shooting less than a year later.

Edit: I think what is likely is that Nolan had passed off the general outline that he and Goyer came up with to Jonah, then it was kind of out of sight out of mind until he was done with Inception. This would explain why the article phrased it that way.